Of Unix and Linux

I've been wondering if the major thing propping up the commercial Unix implementations is inertia; I got an email today that added a data point in that direction. I've had numerous people tell me that Linux on x86 hardware tends to be faster than either Solaris or HPUX - this email snippet goes into that. The first comment was mine, in response to a thread in vwnc on the startup time for VisualWorks applications. The response came from a customer:

"(b) Your Sun boxes are pretty slow/overloaded"

Definitely (b). We have a lot of ~450MHz Sun boxes and the latest generation of Sun hardware is only ~1GHz. We commonly see the same code run 4-6x faster on a cheap Linux box. We would love to support Linux, but our customer base just isn't very interested. Also note that these are server machines that are usually doing other things, so we don't have 100% of the machine at our disposal.

Which is in line with what other people tell me. It's likely the case that Solaris (et. al.) can scale to higher levels than x86 Linux - based on how many CPU's can be slammed into them, if nothing else. That advantage won't hold up much longer.